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> first attempts will probably fail

First hundreds of attempts? In your experience, is that a reasonable number?

The first attempts made by any particular person are likely to fail. And when many people approach similar problems from similar perspectives, they are likely to make similar mistakes. Give them a few years, and someone will probably figure out what the mistakes were and how to avoid them.

Right- thousands of people making the same predictable learning curve mistakes isn't thousands of man-hours of new research. It's thousands of (wo)men all duplicating the same few hours of research, which isn't likely to result in any breakthrough.

If 10 people hike to Mt Everest's base camp, it's not the equivalent of one person climbing ~10 times further to the peak.

What field do you come from where people succeed so often at cutting-edge research?

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